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Publisher's Note: This is a short version of Lucy Snyder's award-winning collection Sparks and Shadows.

This sampler edition contains the stories "Boxlunch", "The Sheets Were Clean and Dry", "Burning Bright", "Roses of Gomorrah", "Flesh and Blood", and four humor essays.

The fiction, poetry, and humor in these pages will appeal to any reader of the dark fantastic. By turns touching, chilling, surreal, wryly satiric, seductive, thrilling and laugh-out-loud funny, this collection will take you from adventures in the far reaches of outer space to the dark magic hidden beneath the surface of modern America. Sparks and Shadows won the 2008 Editors' Choice Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Collection. The award is sponsored by Dark Scribe Magazine.

If you enjoy these stories, we hope you will consider purchasing the full collection, which is available both as an ebook and as a trade paperback.

Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Steampunk World, In the Court of the Yellow King, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad 2, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5.

She lives in Ohio and is a mentor in Seton Hill University's MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

In just the first few pieces in Sparks, Snyder takes the reader from a white-knuckle dystopian race to save a loved one's "soul," to a humorous essay on the horrid inequity of "chick pants" vs. "guy pants," and somehow manages to maintain the feeling of a cohesive (delightful) authorial voice in the process. I was hooked quickly and stayed hooked. Plus, I really doubt that I've had many reading experience in which I felt less prepared to guess what was coming next (in a good way). I'm amazed at the speed and skill with which Snyder can take me from laughing aloud, to being totally engrossed in a story, to being totally freaked out. Great fiction. Great insight. Great humor. Check it out. You'll like it.